The financial difficulties experienced by Greece since 2009 serve as a reminder that countries (i.e., sovereigns) may default on their debt. Many observers considered the financial turmoil was behind us because major advanced countries had adopted stimulus packages to prevent banks from going...

During the 1930s, rating agencies took up a central role in regulatory supervision that they still have today. The proximate cause for this changeover was the economic shock of the Great Depression. Exploring the performance of rating agencies in assessing the risks of sovereign debt, an...

This paper builds a new dataset with detailed information on the universe of foreign government bonds issued in New York in the 1920s and uses these data to describe the behavior of the financial intermediaries which operated in the New York market during the period leading to the interwar debt...

During 1982–83 and 2003–04, two waves of decentralization in France devolved more powers to the three levels of subnational governments (SNGs): the municipalities, the departments, and the regions. This new institutional framework has enabled SNGs to enjoy a greater degree of autonomous...

The public debt crisis that Eurozone countries have experienced since 2010 has been accompanied by a resurgence of sovereign risk. Greece was obliged to restructure its debt in 2012. The credit position of even the wealthy countries is shakier than at any time since the Great Depression. Now...

The present international financial architecture (IFA) has been weakening since the early 2010s. Several factors have hindered the reorganization of the current IFA, accelerated the bipolarization of international financial relations, and reshaped the balance of power between sovereign debtors...

The financial difficulties experienced by Greece since 2009 serve as a reminder that countries (i.e., sovereigns) may default on their debt. Many observers considered the financial turmoil was behind us because major advanced countries had adopted stimulus packages to prevent banks from going...